Lowest-friction wins. Nobody complains when you cancel a license for someone who left 18 months ago.
Vendors negotiate. Start 60 days before renewal — leverage drops to zero once auto-renewal fires.
Premium tiers are often unused. Pull actual usage data before each renewal and drop to the right tier.
No direct dollar recovery, but every quarter you skip this, the next audit gets 2-3x harder.
Builds a copy-paste-ready summary of every ticked item, your total estimated recovery, and the recommended next steps.
One-page printable version of all 20 items with notes columns next to each. Useful for taking into a vendor renewal call or attaching to a board update. PDF sent to your inbox within 24 hours.
Items and savings ranges are derived from 40+ real SaaS audits Milo has analyzed across companies in the 20-500 employee range. Each item shows a typical low-to-high recovery band, and the live tally uses the midpoint. Median company finds $4,000-12,000 per month recoverable across all 20 items, but actual numbers scale with company size, stack breadth, and how long since the last audit. A 5-person startup with 8 SaaS tools will not recover $12,000 per month. A 200-person company with 80 tools often recovers more. Treat the tally as a target to validate against your actual numbers, not a guaranteed payout. Tier 1 typically pays for the audit's time cost by the second item.
The per-item ranges are derived from 40+ real SaaS audits Milo has analyzed across companies in the 20-500 employee range. Each item shows a typical low-to-high recovery band, and the live tally uses the midpoint of each ticked range. Median company finds $4,000-12,000 per month recoverable across all 20 items, but your actual number scales with company size, stack breadth, and how long since the last audit. A 5-person startup with 8 SaaS tools will not recover $12,000 per month. A 200-person company with 80 tools often recovers more than $12,000 per month. Treat the tally as a target to validate against your actual numbers, not a guaranteed payout.
Tier 1 first (terminated-employee licenses, inactive users, admin demotion, duplicate vendors, trial conversions). These are 40-60% of typical audit wins, take less than an hour each, and have zero downside. Tier 2 (contract renegotiation) is the biggest dollar lever but takes longer per vendor and depends on renewal timing — start the conversations 60 days before renewal. Tier 3 (usage-based optimization) requires admin access and time to verify usage data; do it once your renewal pipeline is stable. Tier 4 (visibility and process) is the prevention layer — do it during the audit so the next one is faster, even though it does not recover dollars directly. Tier 1 typically pays for the time you spend on the entire audit by the second item.
SaaS management tools (Vendr, Cledara, Spendflo, Zluri, etc.) automate the data collection — they connect to your SSO, scan expense reports, and surface usage stats. They are useful at scale (500+ employees with 100+ tools) where manual audit is impractical. For everyone else, you do not need a tool to find this waste — you need 4 hours and this checklist. The checklist itself surfaces 80% of what a management tool would, and the management tool typically costs $1-3K per month — often more than the waste it would catch for a smaller company. Use the checklist quarterly; consider a management tool only when manual audit takes more than a day per quarter.
Partially. Items 1-10 (license waste + contract negotiation) translate directly to AI API spend (cancel orphan API keys, renegotiate volume tiers, drop unused premium tiers like Pro vs Team). Items 11-15 (usage-based optimization) translate to cloud infra (audit reserved capacity vs on-demand, right-size instances, drop premium support, adjust log retention). Items 16-20 (visibility and process) translate exactly. For deep cloud spend audit, see the calculator suite — the AWS NAT Gateway, S3 Egress, and EC2 Reserved vs On-Demand calculators address the three most common cloud waste patterns. For AI spend audit, the LLM Bill Triage $299 deep report runs a 32-rule library against your actual usage CSV.
No. Every checkbox state and the running savings tally are stored in your browser's localStorage on your machine only. Nothing is transmitted. If you submit your email for the printable PDF, that email is stored for delivery and never sold or shared. The page fires anonymous pageview and event beacons (path + event name) so we can measure whether the checklist is useful — no vendor names, no dollar amounts, no checked-item lists ever leave your browser.